Frontiers in chemical ecology and coevolution

7th New Phytologist Workshop

9–10 September 2013, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY USA

Goal

The main goal is to bring together a small group of leaders in the diverse and emerging areas of plant chemical ecology, to brainstorm about future directions and ways to integrate across disciplines, and to engage a new generation of chemical ecologists by encouraging participation of senior students, postdocs, and junior faculty. The approach is decidedly diverse, encompassing model system research and natural populations, spanning work on plants, herbivores and pollinators, and scaling from mechanisms to ecological effects to evolutionary biology.

Rationale and scope

There has been tremendous growth in the area of chemical ecology and the study of coevolution. In particular, the infusion of modern chemical and molecular methods with classic questions on the interactions of plants and other species has enhanced progress. This symposium will be particularly timely and beneficial to the New Phytologist community because there has been a remarkable increase in the papers published in this area in the journal (plant-herbivore interactions, coevolution, evolutionary ecology of plant defense against insects and pathogens, multitrophic interactions). In addition, there continues to be a healthy tension between the use of model and non-model systems in chemical ecology, and we see one of the major outcomes of this symposium to reconcile and push forward the combined use of such systems. As always, issues of chemical ecology stand at the border between advancing knowledge of biodiversity and basic biology with that of pest management and maximizing plant production in the face of enemy attack.